Beaker

This flared beaker likely once held ritual liquids, possibly chicha, a fermented corn beverage imbibed widely throughout what is now South America. Created by artists of the Lambayeque (also known as Sicán) culture, the vessel was fashioned from a blank or ingot that was first hammered into a thin sheet then shaped over a wooden mold. Such standardization allowed the Lambayeque to develop a highly sophisticated large-scale industry around smelting and metalworking on the northern Pacific coast of Peru, so much so that a single high-status burial could include hundreds of metal objects. This particular beaker features a non-figural design of parallel lines rendered in repoussé, both at the top and near the base of the vessel. Lambayeque metallurgists created such objects in workshops, using long blowpipes made of reeds and fitted with ceramic tips to regulate, with extraordinary control, the temperature and air flow within furnaces.

Before Lambayeque workshops began producing flared beakers, drinking vessels on the northern coast generally took the shape of goblets. Artists of the earlier Moche culture (c. 200-900 CE), for instance, are known for creating goblet-like ceramics with rounded basins and trapezoidal bases decorated with intricate fineline paintings. The flared cylindrical form of Lambayeque beakers is thought to have originated much further south, with examples like the one seen here bearing a closer resemblance to vessels created by artists of the Wari and the Tiwanaku cultures (c. 500-1000 CE) in the south-central highlands and the altiplano (high plains). The adoption of this silhouette reflects how the Lambayeque cultivated a unique artistic identity, one that drew from various traditions found across Peru.

Ji Mary Seo, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, 2023-2024

References

Carcedo Muro de Mufarech, Paloma. “Los vasos en la orfebrería sicán.” In Cultura Sicán: Esplendor preincaico de la costa norte, edited by Izumi Shimada, 107-146. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2014.

Carcedo Muro de Mufarech, Paloma, and Izumi Shimada. “Behind the Golden Mask: Sicán Gold Artifacts from Batán Grande, Peru.” In The Art of Precolumbian Gold: The Jan Mitchell Collection, edited by Julie Jones, 60-75. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985.

Jones, Julie, and Heidi King. “Gold of the Americas.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 59, no. 4 (Spring, 2002): 5-55.

Rehder, J. E. “Blowpipes Versus Bellows in Ancient Metallurgy.” Journal of Field Archaeology vol. 21, no. 3 (Autumn, 1994): 345-350.

Shimada, Izumi. “El proyecto arqueológico de Sicán: Una caracterización.” In Cultura Sicán: Dios, riqueza y poder en la Costa Norte del Peru, edited by Izumi Shimada, 17-36. Lima: Fundación del Banco Continental para el Fomento de la Educación y la Cultura, 1995.